This Doesn’t Happen to Guys
Text by Denis-Martin Chabot
Illustration by Florence Sabatier
Translation by Anita Anand
She suddenly jerks up to relight the joint she’d put out not even ten minutes before. She inhales a long puff and struggles to hold it. She lets it out in a violent cough.
She avoids your eyes, your questioning look.
Are you all right? Her reply is a mumble. About as intelligible as a teenager’s grunts at breakfast. She inhales another puff and then exhales it in another coughing fit.
You sure everything’s all right? She glares at you. If looks could kill. It’s pretty clear she didn’t approve of the expeditious way you made love to her.
She stubs out her joint in the ashtray on the night table. That was your first time.
Still a virgin, surprising for a guy your age.
She’d been intimate with so many others. She was experienced, knew exactly what she liked and was convinced she knew everything there was to know about male sexuality. She performed an act of fellatio worthy of its name, one no self-respecting man with the slightest libido could resist. But your cock remained skittish.
You don’t like that? No, no, it’s great. Great? Great! I’m not filling you up here. There’s no gas in your hose.
You ignored her passive aggressiveness and began to stimulate yourself. Enough to be adequately solid for the rest, which you rushed through. Completely missing her elusive G spot. You just wanted to get it over with.
Like with him. A nightmare to get through. And then he’d give you candy.
This is just between us. Don’t tell anyone anything.
You never said anything about it to anyone at all. You ate a lot of sweets, the ones he gave you and the ones you bought yourself later. You ate your emotions.
Your body expanded, as if you were building a fortress with your rolls of flesh. Every bite a punishment, an act of violence, an attack, you were convinced, you deserved. Kilo by kilo, you flagellated yourself, adding weight to your suffering, adding edema and pain to your injuries. And not only to your physical injuries.
This body you fattened up would make you a target of fat shaming, particularly in high school.
You imposed diets on yourself, going from one extreme to the other. You lost your extra kilos, got back a silhouette more in step with the fashion industry and with superficiality in general. But at what cost! So here you are, with an eating disorder that will follow you around your whole life.
She didn’t reach her desired climax. She’s frustrated and lets you know. There are no frigid women, only men who are lousy lovers.
You confess to her that you’re a virgin. Yes, still, at nineteen. You tell her what you had never been able to say before. Not everything. Just enough so she understands and shows you some compassion. You make yourself vulnerable.
She bursts out laughing. Oh, come on, that’s nothing! Those things only happen to girls. Not to boys! Be a man. Get a grip. Get over it. Don’t be a wuss.
You have no words for your humiliation. You hold back your helpless tears, the same ones you struggled to hide as a child after another one of those times with your uncle, one too many times, like the thing that happened in the shed at the sugar shack. That uncle whose name you don’t say, because nobody wanted to believe it, not even your parents. Well, in fact they did, but for everyone’s sake, it was better to sweep it all under the rug. A good old family secret, like the ones families are still keeping, in the interest of avoiding fights and preventing scandals. You didn’t say anything after that, to help yourself forget about it, to pretend it never happened.
But it did happen.
Did you get hard? A guy won’t get an erection unless he wants it, unless he’s enjoying himself. She laughs harder. And if you came, well, maybe you should ask yourself...
Could that erection have betrayed a repressed instinct? A case of latent homosexuality?
You’re not gay; you’re ashamed anyway.
You never saw that girl again.
Many others swept through your bedroom. Surprisingly, this happens as you’re cultivating the addictions that soothe your pain, which you never brought up again. You soak yourself in alcohol and fill your nostrils with cocaine, but your penis remains functional.
You want these women intensely, in your heart. But once in an intimate situation, you feel extremely uncomfortable. You close your eyes and see him again, remember what he did to you. You finish quickly. They leave frustrated. They don’t come back.
One day one of them gets past your unease. She’s gentle and compassionate and she’s able to make you forget everything for a brief, decidedly ephemeral experience of pleasure. You stop drinking and using drugs, long enough for you to have two children, something you never thought possible. So, there you are, Daddy to a boy and a girl whom you don’t know how to love because of...that. You fear their affection; you fear giving them affection even more. It’s back, staring you in the face. Taking you back to the place where you never wanted to return. To his unwanted caresses. His unconsented touching. Holding, hugging your children gets confused in your head with what he made you endure. You don’t want to be like him, that monster who messed with your head and mixed up gentleness and violence, love and hate, tenderness and aggressiveness, and pride and fear.
You sink into addiction once more because of this sense of inadequacy. You fall from high, plunge deep down. You drink more than you ever did before and you lose your mind in that sinus-blocking white powder.
Your partner and your children endure this, despite themselves and despite yourself, this manifestation of your pain through rebukes, punishments and loud outbursts. Fortunately, you never raise a hand against them. Your kids don’t know what to do, your spouse, what to say so you don’t get carried away by another fit of disproportionate rage.
Your liver drowns in your alcoholism. Your nose, the cocaine addiction. Your mind dies. Your life withers away. Your family leaves you. Your boss fires you.
You’ve reached rock bottom, at the age of forty-five. This can’t go on. You have to choose. Continue down this path or get a hold of yourself.
You give yourself a second chance. After a difficult stint in rehab, you control your addictions a bit better. But you’re not out of the woods yet.
You’re recruited by a company that does renovations. As you fix up houses, you rebuild your life. Your existence becomes warm and welcoming again and your family returns to live under your roof.
A brief return. Not even a whole year. You aren’t quite ready to step back into your role as a father. You lose it less, but it’s still too much. Your violence, though only verbal, brings your relationship with your family to a definitive end.
Your years of using robbed you of joint custody of your kids, who will only visit you once every two weeks. Defeating alcohol and coke is one thing. Fighting the demons of the past, a whole other thing.
This time, no going back. You look for a way out, join a self-help group for guys like yourself. In this caring space, you open up. Finally. You let out everything that has been choking you. You tell your story. In your own words. You’re listened to. Without judgment. Heard. Believed.
You free yourself, break the chains of the past, turn toward the future. You cry and your tears carry away all the pain plaguing your soul, that of your stolen youth, your troubled adolescence and adulthood, the family you lost. You name the person who ruined everything. You’re angry with him, and that’s normal.
That uncle died. You come to terms with the idea that your drama will never be...not avenged...but acknowledged by the person who caused it; nor by your parents, who closed their eyes, and who are also deceased.
You tell your story to your ex-partner and to your children, who are now adults. You will never be able to correct the past, but the future is looking better.
From this point on, the road ahead has a destination. It leads to you.